The U.S. Open, with its rowdy crowds and blaring pop tunes on changeovers, has long suffered a reputation as the enfant terrible of the tennis tour. In 1977, a stray bullet fired from a nearby apartment building hit a spectator in the leg; in the early '80s, play was suspended when fumes from burning garbage threatened to overwhelm the crowd. Romanian tennis star Ilie Nastase once stripped down to his jockstrap at a change of ends at the U.S Open, and the following year, he brought a companion to cheer him on from the players’ box—his pet chimpanzee. The championship’s PR embarrassments persist even today: This year, disturbances broke out at the entry gates when newly installed metal detectors caused hour-long bottlenecks.

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The American Grand Slam has come a long way since the old days, but tennis has long prided itself on its gentlemanliness—so some Wimbledon-reverent purists may always consider the U.S. Open an affront to the world’s most genteel game. But there’s another, smaller contingent of people who might consider the noisy, unpredictable U.S. Open the only tournament that carries on the traditional spirit of authentic tennis—that is, real tennis.

Among those staunch few are the real tennis players of the world, and there were about 10,000 of them at last count, according to a 2012 story in The Wall Street Journal. “Real tennis," often called "court tennis" in the U.S., refers to tennis as it was played in chivalric Europe. Historians tend to agree that it has changed little from the game French monks invented in the 12th century, which was the progenitor of all modern racquet sports. They also agree that real tennis venues were the sites of some of the most lurid mischief and scandal of the time.

Today's real tennis enthusiasts have a beef with modern tennis—or “lawn tennis” as they call it, regardless of the surface—and it centers on what they characterize as an intellectual property theft that took place more than a century ago.

“It never should have been called tennis,” Lesley Ronaldson, a former real tennis doubles champion and a lecturer at Hampton Court Palace in London, England, said of lawn tennis. “It’s a completely different game. In the Victorian era, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield decided to move it to a lawn and call it Sphairistikè. There’s a ball and a net and that’s where the similarities end.”

When I asked if she had watched any of the U.S. Open, Ronaldson feigned a gag. “We’re much more interested in cricket. Except maybe when Andy Murray is playing.”

The layout of the real tennis court at Hampton Court Palace offers a hint as to why aficionados of the Tudor-era game consider lawn tennis a watered-down vulgarization of their sport. The sheer number of surfaces to play a point off of is overwhelming: Modeled on a medieval marketplace, the court is hemmed on three sides by penthouses, essentially long cowsheds with sloping roofs. It also includes an array of bemusing architectural features, such as an angled replica of a flying buttress called a “tambour,” a huge netted opening on one end called a “dedans,” and a window called a “grille” that's a sudden point-ender. At Hampton Court Palace, the grille frames a portrait of a pudgy Henry VIII, one of the sport’s greatest champions before all that banqueting caught up with him.

All of these peculiarities make for a game that feels at times more akin to pinball than a racquet sport. “It’s so much more interesting because of that element of unpredictability,” Ronaldson told me. “It’s all about finesse, technique, and last-second adjustments rather than brute power.” She promised me that any lawn tennis player who tried real tennis would undergo a conversion experience.

Some who try it, though, may find themselves converted to nothing but frustrated wrecks. The ball hurtles at you from innumerable directions. It thuds off the slanted roof behind you, dropping down at your feet, or glances off a sidewall, skidding at you slantwise, or comes barreling with severe slice off the racket of the opposing player, barely clearing the sagging net. The key to the game, as I was reminded again and again, is anticipation, reading several steps ahead where the ball will bounce and moving there in time to take a decent swing at it—a task that weds hand-eye coordination with a knack for on-the-fly trigonometry. The balls themselves, heavy cork cores wound in cloth and covered in hand-stitched felt, have little bounce, and the racquet face is minute—only a hand-span across—reflecting the game’s roots in the French “jeu de paume,” or handball.

The key to the game is anticipation, reading several steps ahead of the ball and moving in time to take a decent swing at it—a task that weds hand-eye coordination with a knack for on-the-fly trigonometry.

For all its confounding difficulty, though, there‘s something transporting about playing on a court that has been in continuous use since the 1530s, like the one at Hampton Court Palace. It was here, legend has it, that during a match King Henry VIII received news that Anne Boleyn had been beheaded.

This odd, fossilized pastime would perhaps seem to be the preserve of a dwindling pool of Luddites and nostalgists, but after going dormant for much of the 20th century, the sport has seen a robust revival. A new facility was built in 2012 in Chicago, bringing the global tally of courts to 50. And the sport continues to attract more and more followers outside its historical blue-blood set.

Case in point: Johnny Borrell, frontman of the popular UK band Razorlight, is now one of the sport’s most vocal—and, yes, perhaps only—celebrity proselytizers. He owns a house in a remote French Basque village and bought this particular property because its garden borders one of the oldest real tennis courts in existence.

Seeing a rock star swap his skin-tight threads for tennis whites and fling himself around a centuries-old court can prompt some dizzying cognitive dissonance. Borrell is famous for the raw emotion of his performances and his audacious, headline-grabbing statements, but as I watched him play at the Hollyport Real Tennis Club near London, he genially called out scores—“15 serving 40 second chase one yard worse than last gallery”—sometimes complimenting an opponent’s skillful “giraffe serve” or a pinpoint strike of the cowbell hanging in the winner’s gallery (whatever that signifies). But Borrell likened real tennis to a game of high-velocity, multi-dimensional chess—as much psychological as physical. “The main difference between real tennis and lawn tennis is the capacity for self-expression,” he said. “With real tennis, you have so many more options with which to develop a personal style. It’s like boxing. You can be a brawler or hold to classical form.”

With its sometimes baffling archaisms and courtly decorum, real tennis seems to open a rip in time. For Borrell, the sport affords an escape from the din of the Twitterverse and pop culture, and to him, lawn tennis is only so much more telegenic emptiness. As he put it, “Real tennis is Caravaggio. Lawn tennis is Page 3”—referring to the daily feature found in UK tabloid The Sun that displays a topless model.

It was a revealing comparison: The great Baroque artist Caravaggio, a murderer and infamous roué, was no stranger to the lowlife. And real tennis courts themselves, originally the playground of the ecclesiastical orders, later degenerated into gambling halls that doubled as trysting spots for gentlemen and their mistresses. The viewing galleries were even designed with the concealment of certain sex acts in mind (the archaic French slang for a tennis court, “tripot” lent its name to the verb “tripoter,” meaning “to fondle”), and in 17th-century England, the sport was outlawed in order to contain a betting epidemic.

Even in the rarefied world of real tennis, then, the sacred is never far separated from the profane. Maybe the rough pageantry of the U.S. Open isn’t such a perversion of the so-called “sport of gentlemen” as the tennis establishment would have you think.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.